On Cioran

"... a man cracking jokes while waiting in line to be thrown alive into a mass grave."

When I begin to stub a different toe seemingly every day, or, worse, the same toe, or when I start to glimpse the gormlessness in every thought expressed by others both online and in-person and see some fresh inanity in each statement made by yours truly, which is to say, when things seem bad or feel bad or just plain are bad, as when disgust and anxiety make overtures toward every dismal corner of my mind—when it starts to feel like I’ve contracted a hangover of the soul—when the price of cigarettes inexplicably rises again—when I wake coughing at four in the morning and curse myself for still smoking the fucking things—when each day dawns gray and every night brings with it the awareness of new idiocies of the gasping, heaving and suppurating brain—that is, my brain—when, at my favorite local café here in Nashville, which I’ve just yesterday learned is about to close permanently in order to become a boutique clothing store (for fuck’s sake), I continually overhear young evangelicals talking about where the Lord, that indomitable confirmer of the chirping presentiments of genuine believers, state and national legislators, megachurch pastors and other insatiable grifters of the cloth-wearing kind, is leading them at this stage of their journey—“I just feel so good about my walk with Him right now,” they inevitably say—whenever my thought turns too often to book editors in New York or novelists in Brooklyn or boomer dads prophesying the future domination of AI in the American workplace or zoomers wearing high-waisted baggy jeans or middle-aged poets making dated (or worse, up-to-date) pop-culture references or well-off liberals talking about moving to Canada after the next election or find myself contemplating the so-called virtues of monogamy or the vacuities of kitchen table polyamory—when I think overlong about the dreary notions of purity and chastity with which I was raised or the innocuous vices against which I was warned, or find myself thinking about homeowners with leaf-blowers or university administrators fattening on the efforts of adjuncts or comic book heroes on the silver screen yet again saving this utterly-not-worth-saving-world—when I find myself imagining with pleasure the sudden destruction by fire of whole city blocks of nice houses I’ll never begin to be able to afford—when I realize that the pain in my jaw derives from the fact that I have been grinding my teeth all afternoon—i.e., when I’ve got a case of the shits either literal or metaphorical or both, I often turn to a short book by E.M. Cioran called in its original title Syllogismes de l’amertume. No better antidote exists. Soon enough, my regularity, along with my sense of humor, returns, under the tutelage of one who could say: “I observe, in terror, the diminution of my hatred of mankind, the loosening of the last link uniting me with it.” Exactly, Emil. Thank you.

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Cioran is not an exhaustive writer but an evacuative one. Seeing in the world nothing more than the Void, and finding inside that nothingness nothing more than a self—his self—a kind of inexhaustibly existing corpse, he elects to void the Void. Reading him affords one the sensation of suddenly waking for the first time in days and, upon doing so, relieving oneself of a great and heavy burden. One looks up from the work a lighter being. And yet also fortified. Taking in a page of Cioran is like a having belt of whiskey that makes you feel soberer, as whiskey occasionally does. He tells us that as a young man the idea of death threw him “into trances”. In middle age he confesses that if he were to dig his own grave now, “all I would drop in there would be cigarette butts.” 

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Facts, autobiographical: he was born in 1911 in Rasinari, a village high in the Carpathians, and wrote his first three books in his twenties, in his native Romanian, during which time he both admired and was a vocal proponent of the fascism then flourishing in that region and elsewhere.¹ The love affair did not last. In later years he repudiated his former self, and seemed to look back on the period with a kind of bafflement and abiding shame. In 1937 he received a scholarship to study philosophy at the Sorbonne—he failed to attend a single class, but did make extensive use of the cafeterias, until a law was passed forbidding students above the age of twenty-seven to eat in them. Thereafter he took to the salons and accepted as many dinner invitations as he was offered. He switched from writing in Romanian to French, an arduous task that caused the gestation of his first book in that language, A Short History of Decay, to take more than a decade.

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Cioran is infamously bleak but I mostly read him for laughs. In English, Syllogismes de l’amertume literally means Syllogisms of Spite or Syllogisms of Bitterness. To call it All Gall is Divided, as does its otherwise wonderful translator the late poet Richard Howard², constitutes an act of literary butchery, though I don’t think Cioran, himself something of a literary or philosophical butcher, a writer who spent much of his time in what might be called the abattoir of the spirit, would be much bothered. Gall itself is probably one of the only human emotions other than rage and violence that Cioran would’ve termed unifying—not, of course, in any positive sense (there being no real positive sense in his work to start with, especially on the subject of unity; in one of his later books he confesses to having discouraged a friend from killing himself by pointing out that, if dead, his friend would no longer possess the pleasure of being able to deride life)—after all, as he tells us, “this world doesn’t deserve to be known.” Speaking of titles, there may be no better way to describe Cioran to the uninitiated than to list a few of the English titles of his other works: his first and second books, written in his native Romanian, called On the Heights of Despair and Tears and Saints, provide something of his overall flavor. These were followed by his first French productions, the aforementioned A Short History of Decay, the above Syllogismes, and, to name a couple more: The Trouble with Being Born and Drawn and Quartered. Cheerful books, all.

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Despite the enthusiasms of at least a couple major American critics, notably George Steiner and Susan Sontag, I don’t think our subject has ever had much of an audience here, neither among the existentialist-leaning philosophers with whom he’s often grouped nor with the more literary types, among whom, having never produced a single work of fiction, beaten out a review, indulged himself in a personal essay, or excreted a poem, he makes an odd fit. Besides his writing he seems to have had a rather robust relationship to doing nothing. Other than a disastrous year in his twenties teaching high school in his native Romania, he himself spent no time as an academic. (Costica Bradatan reports that when Cioran quit the teaching job the principal was so thrilled that he literally “drank himself into a stupor” in celebration.) He liked to boast that he had no vocation. No job: he even took this so far as to say he wasn’t a writer. He never published a single work of scholarship, nor a translation of any kind. During my own time in academia—three years in grad school plus parts of five or six others as an adjunct—I’ve never met a single person who has read him; not terribly surprising, I suppose, considering the narrow scope and purview of the average American academic. The most recent time I saw him mentioned in print by an American essayist, the writer could not be troubled to provide a more in-depth analysis of his work than could be found on his Goodreads profile. This particular writer confessed to admiring his aphorisms but could not bear him at any length. This seems something of a recurring theme with his Anglo-American readers: those who find themselves seduced by his purely epigrammatic writing often seem put off by the fabulous density and vertiginous hyperbole of his essays—that and perhaps the fact that his sense of humor is that of a man cracking jokes while waiting in line to be thrown alive into a mass grave. As Rob Doyle pointed out in a very good essay on him a few years ago, despite having had an edition of his complete works put out by Gallimard, which is as close for the French as official canonization can get, it doesn’t seem like Cioran has much of a readership in France, either. Milan Kundera somewhere observes that, on first moving to Paris,  even in the mid-seventies Cioran was constantly going in and out fashion. C’est la vie. William Gass, in his 1968 review of The Temptation to Exist, called it the work of “an essentially frivolous mind.” All Gass seemed to see in him was Cioran’s sense of alienation. He wasn’t impressed. Though he describes Cioran’s essays as “superbly written, economical, concerned with the very foundations of thought and being,” Gass ultimately finds the Romanian émigré’s philosophy to be made up of “extraordinarily careless pieces of reasoning, [which] travel from fallacy to fallacy with sovereign unconcern.” Like many of Thomas Bernhard’s early readers in English, Gass ultimately misses the joke—that the frivolousness is a feature, not a bug—and, thereby, the point. To attack the reasoning of a writer who likes little better than making assaults on reasoning itself, contradicting himself every step of the way—contradicting himself by method, in fact—strikes us as pointless. Gass also fails to see Cioran primarily as a writer. There is no philosophical system at play here. In fact, there is a great deal more play than there are ideas per se (as he puts it in Temptation: “all my metaphysical inclinations come up short against my frivolity”); for Cioran, it is ideas and ideologies themselves that are, after all, the root of most human trouble—especially trouble on a mass-scale—particularly when we approach them with the so-called seriousness which such quasi-monuments to reason seem to demand. “Only superficial minds approach an idea with delicacy.” At all events, it makes sense to me that an American literary audience would fail to find much enthusiasm for a writer who claims that “Only optimists commit suicide,” while a French reading public might object to an author capable of flatly claiming, “How easy it is to be ‘deep’: all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws,” or that “Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.” Rather ironically for a writer whose major subjects are death and nothingness, one gets the sense he just isn’t serious enough for some folks. Also: why on earth does someone who doesn’t believe in God keep talking about him and even to him in the text? One can hear Gass grumbling in the background: If you have it both ways, you have it no ways. Cioran replies: Precisely. “In the still of certain nights, for lack of a confidant, we are reduced,” he writes, “to the One who played this part for centuries, for millennia.” Nevertheless, he has a bone to pick with that One, more than one, the wrath that inheres in nearly all his disappointment both with existence and its supposed founder and sustainer, most vivid in his early works, as here in Tears and Saints, when he addresses the creator directly: “Here I am, God, awaiting the last judgment with everybody else. You will then judge us en masse, for you don’t dare look our loneliness in the face.” Considering that even the Gospels tells us that the Father turned his face from the Son amidst the suffering of the crucifixion, this strikes us as theologically sound.

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I like best to read him in late winter or early spring, in order to temper my expectations for summer. Sometimes I read him in order to protect myself from my own hope—at others to rinse myself with the absurdity of my despair. Or, likewise in the fall, when I generally fear death the most. Almost every year I develop a new somatic ailment which I am sure will result in my death, perhaps as practice for the fall when I eventually hit the floor with the real thing. My first exposure to his work came in a public library copy of Anathemas and Admirations in which I made so many marginal notes that I eventually decided to pay the eighty dollar lost book fee and keep it, a good deal of those notes made while half-drunk, smoking cigarettes while lounging in the lukewarm water of a half-clean bathtub in a cheap hotel in rural Tennessee, on a trip to see a state park which still bears the name of the founding dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Cioran goes down well in such a place.

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The sweeping generalization finds in him its closest and arguably most elegant ally. There is nothing modest in our émigré, who is nothing if not an exhibitionist of despair. Though the aphorism or epigram may be, in terms of literary modes, as old as any in western literature, he brings little reverence to it—then again, Cioran brings little reverence to anything. In his criticism, particularly in his longer essays, he shows himself to be an aficionado par excellence of the unsupported and unsubstantiated claim. If he wants to describe a writer, he doesn’t quote him, or quotes sparingly, instead piling on adjectival phrases like an oil-painter piling on paint. He has about as much interest in persuading the reader of the rightness of his judgments as Robert Bresson would’ve had in depicting a car chase. Clarity, for Cioran, ain’t all it’s cracked up to be: “A distinct idea is an idea without a future.” In spite of this, he comes to us as a writer with something to say, warning us that a writer “must guard against reflecting excessively on language . . . must never forget that the important works have been created despite language. A Dante was obsessed by what he had to say, not by the saying of it.” Like Gombrowicz, who took time to joust with Cioran in his Diary, he is an enemy of awe. “To think,” he writes, “is to stop venerating.” (This seems to us an observation of which the later Gass would’ve approved.) Like Pascal, arguably his most important influence and the writer he came to resemble most, he despises certainty. And yet there are moments when a kind of undeniable glimmer of love for life itself shines through the cracks in the inescapable slaughterhouse of the soul. He contemplates flinging himself off a cliff: “While I was making these rather grim speculations, I suddenly felt how bound I was to this lovely, accursed universe.” Even his most somber utterances often conceal within them a bleak joke. “With every idea born in us,” he writes, “something in us rots.”

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Often compared to Nietzsche—sometimes dismissed, stupidly, as a Nietzsche-imitator—he occasionally sounds like Leopardi (“After a quarter of an hour, no one can observe another’s despair without impatience”) or Dostoevsky (“consciousness is a symptom of estrangement from life caused by illness”) or Schopenhauer (“of all creatures, the least intolerable are those who hate human beings”) or Kierkegaard (“Wherefore the need to add to Ecclesiastes when everything is already in it?”) or the author of Ecclesiastes itself (“how recover from your own birth?”)—or, more often, like the expression of all six writers at once, which is to say, himself. I certainly can’t think of anyone else who could so easily and effortlessly coin such a phrase as “the phosphorescent light of rot,” or who would describe depression as “that alpinism of despair,” or define life itself as “a vice—the greatest one of all. Which is why,” or so he writes by way of explanation, that “we have such difficulty ridding ourselves of it.”

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He was the son of a country priest and an unbelieving mother. “I was a friend of the gravedigger,” he says in one interview. “I was always around the cemetery, all the time I was seeing the disinterred, the skeletons, the cadavers. For me death was something so evident that truly it was a part of my daily life.” Unlike almost every other writer ever born, he claimed to have had the happiest of childhoods. When, at ten years of age, his father took him from his village to go to school in Sibiu, he cried the whole way. “When I had to leave that world, I had the clear premonition that something had been destroyed . . . I wept and wept; I will never be able to forget it as long as I live.” And yet he did live long enough to forget it, to forget everything, to lose the use even of his own name. Despite having always wished to commit suicide upon on the onset of senility, Alzheimer’s took from him his ability to speak. Thus he spent his last days in silence. Before this loss began its gradual removal of him from the world, culminating in his death at age eighty-four, in the late years that presaged his final ones, he had no problem imagining that life might be—probably would be better—if one did not think so much about mortality. “After all,” or so he speculates in Drawn and Quartered, “why should ordinary people want to contemplate the end, especially when we see the condition of those who do?”

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Occasionally he brings to mind a Dostoevsky who, instead of being beset with fevers, epilepsy, xenophobia and Christ-obsession, instead simply could not get to sleep. His insomnia began in his early twenties and he defined it as the seminal experience of his life. Without his sleeplessness, without his white nights, or so he claimed, he would never have written as he did, would never as thought as he did. Though he strikes me as one of the sanest of writers, there are times when he seems exquisitely mad, particularly when writing about the early Christian saints, and perhaps even more so on his pet (read: sometimes most ridiculous) subject, which is to say history and civilization. “In periods of peace,” he writes, “hating for the pleasure of hating, we must find the enemies which suit us;—a delicious task which exciting times spare us.” In the next line he claims that “Man secretes disaster.” Elsewhere in his historical mood he seems to be operating at the height of prescience: “The lamb’s aspiration to become a wolf brings about the majority of events. Those who have none dream of fangs; they would devour in their turn and succeed in doing so by the bestiality of numbers. History—that dynamism of victims.” His shortest utterances on the subject are often the most salient: “History,” he writes, “is irony on the move.” The only truths he recognizes about the actions or inactions of masses of people is that they are either A) armed and going about the business of destruction, B) arming themselves in order to go about the business of destruction, C) waiting to be armed, and as such waiting their turn to become A and B. It is ideas, primarily, in his mind, that make bloodshed on a mass scale possible. “When we refuse to admit the interchangeable character of ideas,” or so he writes in Decay, “blood flows.” Unlike most philosophers, he despises theories. Unlike most writers, he loathes language. An exemplary stylist himself—and perhaps in part because without words there would be no ideas and as such no mass slaughter—he despises the veneration of language (then again, he meets any and all varieties of veneration with disdain): “…anyone who turns from words in horror,” he says, “approaches his deliverance.” In The Temptation to Exist he writes that “poetic prose is sick prose . . . . all faults of taste come from the ‘heart.’” One gets the sense in reading such sentences that he likely regarded the labyrinthine linguistic maneuvers of a Blanchot or Leiris with a kind of bafflement and irritation. As a result, his own work is rarely obscure, but rather proceeds with a variety of clear-eyed ruthlessness that could only derive from a kind of rage at those who refuse to elucidate. One senses in him an intolerance of false gods—the false gods hidden within the French exaltation of language lurking here, an anger at obscurantism: “Every idolatry of style starts from the belief that reality is even more hollow than its verbal figuration, that the ascent of an idea is worth more than the idea, a well-turned excuse more than a conviction, a skillful image more than an unconsidered explosion . . . . A well-proportioned sentence, satisfied with its equilibrium or swollen with its sonority, all too often conceals the malaise of a mind incapable of acceding by sensation to an original universe.”

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His sense of irony is perhaps nowhere better found than in his thoughts on Christianity: “Agony is Christianity’s normal climate. Everybody dies in this religion, even God, as if there were not enough corpses already.” Elsewhere he reminds us that “For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.” God, he describes as “that consoling blank.” He posits that “Scaffolds, dungeons, jails flourish only in the shadow of a faith—of that need to believe which has infested the mind forever.” For me, a recovering evangelical, his attacks on the Apostle Paul in The Trouble With Being Born and elsewhere are especially delicious: “the mob loves a shouter,” he writes. “Paul was one, the most inspired, the most talented, the most artful of antiquity . . . . Whenever I am at a loss for a scapegoat, I open the Epistles and am quickly reassured. I have my man, and he rouses me to a fury.” In A Short History of Decay he describes him as “the most considerable vote-canvasser of all time.” Even stupider than Paul: the notion of voting, of having any impact for the better on humanity in general. Such an action for him could only be made as a failure not so much of will but of personal style. “Any commitment to the cause of humanity betrays a lack of taste and distinction.” And yet there are times when he reminds us of Paul—if a Paul without a cause. Particularly because there are times when Cioran himself seems not to be able to stop shouting, howling, screaming. There is, particularly in the early work, in On the Heights of Despair, the palpable presence of the exhorter and the convert, and we must admit that on occasion he has some pretty silly things to say, even if they have the power—or rather the madness—of youth: “Why don’t I commit suicide,” he asks. The answer finds him practically hollering through the text: “Because I am as sick of death as I am of life. I should be cast into a flaming cauldron!” Utterly unlike Paul, he has nothing to convert us to, no project and certainly no code of conduct. And yet, writing on Joseph de Maistre, he confesses: “To combat a ‘monster’ is necessarily to possess some mysterious affinities with him, and also to borrow from him certain character traits.” Paul’s most grievous sin was his love of purity and his puerile morality and his ultimate lust for authority, for the power gained in being transformed from Saul of Tarsus to Paul the Apostle. For Cioran the only purity is that of the pure fact of the grave. The only authority that exists is that which lies in death, and the only power that of nothingness.

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What brings us back to his blackened pages, his reams of aphorisms as arid as a desert and as devoid of life as the surface of the moon, his draughts of spite and his cup with poison overflowing? Does he help us in any way? I’m not sure. Does it help to laugh at a funeral? I’d argue it absolutely does, but then again, laughter forms only a momentary stay against grief—or no, that’s not quite it. There is no opposition between laughter and grief, just as there’s no opposition more generally between humor and darkness; in fact the two at times feed off of each other. Let me try again. Laughter, it seems to me, allows our grief to breathe. And us, then, to breathe within the grief. The act of laughing, like a sacrament administered, allows us to integrate our grief into ourselves, to bring it into our bodies, to use it with our physical beings, and somehow thereby make it less heavy—though not less painful. In any case, Cioran operates out on the margin past all help, past all helping, all being helped, his only offer of consolation that of no consolation, his work that of a man, I think, who could have found something to laugh at while waiting his turn to be strapped to a gurney, a prisoner who would’ve snickered at the figure of a pastor praying God’s blessing over a prisoner about to receive a lethal injection.

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It’s a wonder to me he didn’t write more about capital punishment. And yet this too makes its own sad sense, for to Cioran’s mind, we are all from the very first moment under sentence. God performs the role of both judge and hangman: He renders the verdict and sets the noose upon the neck and, for kicks, He works the lever on the trap, too. Faced with such a situation, we might as well laugh.

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The Syllogismes is the book of his to which I return most, usually when I become cognizant of the need for the reminder that “One measures one’s strength only in humiliation” (emphasis mine). What else is the life of the writer? The daily failure at the hand of the word, faltered syntax, paragraphs wounded by ill-begotten attempts at revision, the vanished thought or image crushed by a sentence that has for no explicable reason lost its life-force . . .  and these are only some of the humiliations of the working life of the writer, not to mention the wasted afternoons at the keyboard, the hours ill-spent clutching one’s head like a fourteen-year-old jackass unable to complete an algebra problem, the whole days that dwindle away without a word written or a moment enjoyed, one’s spirit ambulating around the nadir of one’s own efflorescent stupidity. That’s when I need the Syllogismes, that’s when Cioran speaks to me, with all his abyss-obsessed bile, and reminds me to fucking lighten up, because for fuck’s sake we’ll all be dead soon, and there’s nothing stupider than fretting or fuming about one’s daily word-count, book sales, or non-existent literary reputation. Why take consciousness so seriously? “How I’d like to be a plant,” Cioran confesses near the end of the book, “even if I had to keep vigil over a piece of shit!”

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To the professional philosopher who objects to Cioran’s lack of rigor, he would no doubt respond: to what end rigor on such a planet? To what end rigor when there is nothing—nothing here nor above—nothing—to be solved? No salvation. No avoidance of pain. No magic get-out-of-death-free card. Each explanation a failure. Thus, in his life Cioran attached himself to no movement and no school, no ideology. What would have been the point? An ideology—any ideology—in the end presents its adherents with precisely the same tools for the avoidance of thought, which is the avoidance of contradiction, as those afforded by faith to the devout. And it is this that first attracted, still attracts me to Cioran: his fatal disinterest in the purity of anything other than the state of permanent defeat in which we oh so briefly find ourselves beautifully and utterly alive. He teaches us that there is nothing at which we should be slower in arriving than a conclusion, that we should see each conclusion reached as nothing more than another one of the dead ends of our thinking, and that every living thing reaches upon its death the apex of the rotting process begun by its birth—and yet . . . rot brings with it new possibilities and new forms: in this way we might reach new fecundities, and those dead ends begin to grow into stranger, wilder forms of life. This is what Cioran gives us.

1. For more on this period, see Costica Bradatan’s excellent “The Philosopher of Failure: Emil Cioran’s Heights of Despair,” in The Los Angeles Review of Books, 28 November 2016.

2. All of the quotations from Cioran’s published works contained in this essay are the translations of Richard Howard, excluding those taken from On the Heights of Despair and Tears and Saints, both of which were originally written in Romanian and wonderfully translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston.

Nathan Knapp is the author of DAYBOOK, a novel published by Splice earlier this year. His criticism has appeared previously in the TLS, the Point, 3AM, Music & Literature, Review 31 and elsewhere.